Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Yo, O.G.G. here with my boy Furious D, looking for some brothers and sisters who love words. At a place like Capstrat filled wall to wall with professional communicators, every day is grammar day, right? Today, the whole country gets into the act.
 
If you have a sec, visit http://nationalgrammarday.com/ for a little fun, a bunch of links, a drink recipe and even a clickable playlist of songs whose authors ought to be rapped across the knuckles by nuns.

Are you hardcore enough to join us? Wanna be a player at Capstrat? We’re coming to the ‘hood to educate you on life in the gang. You up for it? Watch for details on when and where. Till then, holla back with your pet peeves – you know, the grammar and spelling errors that make that vein in your temple throb. No peeve too petty.

Peace out.  

I've gone around for years hectoring people never to write "utilize" when they mean "use." To me it's the ultimate garbage word, worse than all your "leverages" and "proactives" combined.

There's nothing like self-righteous certitude to keep you from actually looking something up. But eventually I got curious, and it turns out there's a reason for the damn thing after all. A very tiny, very specific one. For most utilizers, it's no excuse.

Take a step back: What do you do when you "-ize" something? You transform it into something it wasn't. Bad guys in old Tom Clancy novels "weaponize" viruses - they turn them into weapons. Ron Popeil "monetizes" weird ideas that come to him in the shower - he turns them into money. What do you do when you "utilize" something?

You turn it into an util, of course. Or, for veterans of high school French, "un outil" - a tool. When you utilize something, it didn't start out as a tool, but you turned it into one. You make it useful in a way that is not part of its ordinary function. Eureka.

So:

I was going to use a screwdriver, but I couldn't find one so I utilized a butterknife instead.

The remote control was missing, so I utilized my shoe.

I'm ready to call this the ultimate exception that proves the rule. It applies so seldom that most uses of "utilize" are still wrong, and I get to remain a copy-editing curmudgeon.

I’ve been working on a personal project to help explain mysterious linguistic terms. Most we’ve heard but have unclear meanings. I was trying to make a set of 26 cards. One per letter of the alphabet. Problem is, I have a couple examples of “As” and need more examples of other letters. What I have so far:

Tongue Twister or Alliteration (Grey grub)

Anagram(Elvis lives)

Palindrome(Madam I’m Adam)

Oxymoron(Hot ice)

Reduplicative(Hoot Hoot)

Heteronyms(It’s the bass bass now)

Idiom(Kick The bucket)

Xeno(Alien)

Iwas trying to avoid the obvious like noun or verb. Might be impossible. Anybody have other ideas that fill out the rest of the alphabet or what I can call this project?